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- ÍtemAcceso Abierto
How peace saves lives: evidence from Colombia(2022-12-12) Perilla, Sergio; Prem, Mounu; Purroy, Miguel E.; Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Grupo de investigaciones. Facultad de Economía. Universidad del RosarioThe victimization of civilians and combatants during internal conflicts causes large socioeconomic costs. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether peace negotiations can significantly reduce this burden. One key reason is the lingering presence of antipersonnel landmines, which are hidden underground and remain active for decades. Looking at the recent experience of Colombia, we quantify the number of lives saved by the reduction of landmine accidents and study the institutional conditions under which peace agreements can significantly reduce landmine victimization. Our findings highlight the importance of: reduced counterinsurgency campaigns, post-conflict information sharing, comprehensive humanitarian mine clearance and mine risk management campaigns. - ÍtemAcceso AbiertoFear to Vote: Explosions, Salience, and Elections(2023-07-18) Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Purroy, Miguel E.; Coy, Felipe; Perilla, Sergio; Prem, MounuCriminal groups use violence strategically to manipulate the behavior of victims and bystanders. At the same time, violence is a stimulus that causes fear, which also shapes people’s reactions. Taking advantage of the randomness in the timing of antipersonnel landmine accidents in Colombia, as well as their coordinates relative to those of voting polls, we identify the effect of violence-induced fear (independent from intentions) on electoral behavior. Fortuitous landmine explosions reduce political participation. We further disentangle whether the type of fear caused by landmine explosions responds to an information channel (whereby people learn about the risk of future victimization) or by the salience of the explosion (which causes individuals to make impulsive decisions, driven by survival considerations), and show evidence in favor of the latter. While the turnout reduction takes place across the ideological spectrum, we document that the explosions induce a shift in the political preferences of individuals who do vote. These findings point to worrisome potential consequences for the consolidation of democracies in places affected by conflict.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoCommodity price shocks and civil conflict: Evidence from Colombia(2013) Dube O.; Vargas Duque, Juan FernandoHow do income shocks affect armed conflict? Theory suggests two opposite effects. If labour is used to appropriate resources violently, higher wages may lower conflict by reducing labour supplied to appropriation. This is the opportunity cost effect. Alternatively, a rise in contestable income may increase violence by raising gains from appropriation. This is the rapacity effect. Our article exploits exogenous price shocks in international commodity markets and a rich dataset on civil war in Colombia to assess how different income shocks affect conflict.We examine changes in the price of agricultural goods (which are labour intensive) as well as natural resources (which are not).We focus on Colombia's two largest exports, coffee and oil. We find that a sharp fall in coffee prices during the 1990s lowered wages and increased violence differentially in municipalities cultivating more coffee. This is consistent with the coffee shock inducing an opportunity cost effect. In contrast, a rise in oil prices increased both municipal revenue and violence differentially in the oil region. This is consistent with the oil shock inducing a rapacity effect.We also show that this pattern holds in six other agricultural and natural resource sectors, providing evidence that price shocks affect conflict in different directions depending on the type of the commodity. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoResource curse in reverse: The coffee crisis and armed conflict in Colombia(2006) Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Dube, OeindrilaEntre 1998 y 2003 el precio del café en los mercados internacionales cayó 73 por ciento debido al aumento de la producción del grano en Brasil y Vietnam, lo que originó la llamada “crisis cafetera”. En este trabajo exploramos el efecto de dicho choque exógeno sobre el conflicto armado colombiano. La pregunta es si la violencia política presentó una dinámica distinta en las regiones cafeteras en comparación con las no cafeteras, antes y durante la crisis. Haciendo uso de una metodología de diferencia en diferencias, encontramos que la caída del precio del café a niveles históricamente bajos generó un aumento importante tanto en la incidencia como en la intensidad del conflicto armado colombiano. También proponemos un modelo sencillo sobre la relación entre los choques de precio y el conflicto armado. De éste se desprenden tres mecanismos posibles de transmisión, cuya importancia relativa examinamos empíricamente. La sustitución de cultivos de café por cultivos ilícitos no parece explicar el aumento desproporcional de la violencia durante la crisis. En cambio, sí hay evidencia de que el aumento diferencial de la pobreza en los municipios cafeteros así como el debilitamiento de la institucionalidad, están asociados con mayor violencia política.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoPeaceful Entry: Entrepreneurship Dynamics during Colombia's Peace Agreement(2022-01-18) Bernal, Carolina; Ortiz, Mónica; Prem, Mounu; Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Grupo de investigaciones. Facultad de Economía. Universidad del RosarioWhile there is a large literature on how conflict affects entrepreneurship and private investment, much less is known about how the end of a conflict affects businesses and firms' creation. A priory, the direction of the effect is not obvious, as conflicts bequest poverty traps and inequality that reduce the returns of investment, and the territorial vacuum of power that is inherent to most post-conflict situations may trigger new violent cycles. Studying Colombia's recent peace agreement and using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we document that dynamics of entrepreneurship in traditionally violent areas closely mapped the politics that surrounded the peace agreement. When the agreement was imminent after a 5-decade conflict and violence had plummeted, local investors from all economic sectors established new firms and created more jobs. Instead, when the agreement was rejected by a tiny vote margin in a referendum and the party that promoted this rejection raised to power, the rate of firms' creation rapidly reversed.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoColombia: Democratic but Violent?(2022-01-17) Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Fergusson, Leopoldo; Grupo de investigaciones. Facultad de Economía. Universidad del RosarioColombia is a Latin American outlier in that it has traditionally been a very violent country, yet at the same time remarkably democratic. This chapter explores Colombia’s puzzle from a political economy perspective, shedding light on the broader relationship between democracy and violence. The chapter studies some of the most important democratization reforms since Colombia’s independence 200 years ago. It argues that the reforms often failed to curb violence and sometimes even actively, though perhaps unintendedly, exacerbated violent political strife. Democratic reforms were unable to set the ground for genuine power-sharing. They were often implemented amidst a weak institutional environment that allowed powerful elites, the reforms’ ex-ante political losers, to capture the State and offset the benefits of the reforms for the broader society. We conclude by highlighting the implications of the argument for other countries facing democratic reforms, as well as for Colombia’s current peace-building efforts.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoThe perils of misusing remote sensing data: The case of forest cover(2020-05-06) Fergusson, Leopoldo; Saavedra Pineda, Santiago; Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Grupo de Investigaciones. Facultad de Economía. Universidad del RosarioResearch on deforestation has grown exponentially due to the availability of satellite-based measures of forest cover. One of the most popular is Global Forest Change (GFC). Using GFC, we estimate that the Colombian civil conflict increases ‘forest cover’. Using an alternative source that validates the same remote sensing images in the ground, we find the opposite effect. This occurs because, in spite of its name, GFC measures tree cover, including vegetation other than native forest. Most users of GFC seem unaware of this. In our case, most of the conflicting results are explained by GFC’s misclassification of oil palm crops as ‘forest’. Our findings call for caution when using automated classification of imagery for specific research questions.
- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoSeguridad democrática, presencia de la policía y conflicto en Colombia(2011-11-12) Cortés Cortés, Darwin; Franco, María del Rosario; Hincapié, Laura; Vargas Duque, Juan FernandoEste artículo evalúa uno de los componentes fundamentales de la política más icónica del gobierno de Álvaro Uribe: la ´ Seguridad Democrática. En particular, se evalúa el impacto sobre la intensidad del conflicto armado de los despliegues y refuerzos de policía en municipios con poca o nula presencia policial antes de agosto de 2002. Para ello se utiliza el estimador de diferencia en diferencias que compara el cambio en la dinámica del conflicto una vez se asignan los nuevos efectivos a los municipios receptores, relativo al cambio ocurrido simultáneamente en los municipios no receptores. Nuestros resultados sugieren que tanto los despliegues (instauración de inspecciones de policía en municipios que carecían de ´estas) como los refuerzos (envío de nuevos efectivos a municipios con poca presencia policial previa) generan incrementos en el número de ataques guerrilleros. Por otro lado, también hay evidencia que en los casos en los que la asignación de efectivos policiales estuvo acompañada de la movilización de tropas del ejército el conflicto disminuyó en las áreas afectadas, lo que sugiere que la coordinación de las fuerzas armadas resulta clave para el éxito de iniciativas regionales de seguridad.
ÍtemSolo MetadatosEndogenous Taxation in Ongoing Internal Conflict: The Case of Colombia(2018) CH, RAFAEL; SHAPIRO, JACOB; STEELE, ABBEY; Vargas Duque, Juan FernandoRecent empirical evidence suggests an ambiguous relationship between internal conflicts, state capacity, and tax performance. In theory, internal conflict should create strong incentives for governments to develop the fiscal capacity necessary to defeat rivals. We argue that one reason that this does not occur is because internal conflict enables groups with de facto power to capture local fiscal and property rights institutions. We test this mechanism in Colombia using data on tax performance and property rights institutions at the municipal level. Municipalities affected by internal conflict have tax institutions consistent with the preferences of the parties dominating local violence. Those suffering more right-wing violence feature more land formalization and higher property tax revenues. Municipalities with substantial left-wing guerrilla violence collect less tax revenue and witness less land formalization. Our findings provide systematic evidence that internal armed conflict helps interest groups capture municipal institutions for their own private benefit, impeding state-building. Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018.- ÍtemAcceso AbiertoEnd-of-Conflict Deforestation : Evidence From Colombia’s Peace Agreement(2018-12-26) Prem, Mounu; Saavedra Pineda, Santiago; Vargas Duque, Juan Fernando; Facultad de EconomíaArmed conflict can endanger natural resources through several channels such as direct predation from fighting groups, but it may also help preserve ecosystems by dissuading extractive economic activities through the fear of extortion. The effect of conflict on deforestation is thus an empirical question. This paper studies the effect on forest cover of Colombia’s recent peace negotiation between the central government and the FARC insurgency. Using yearly deforestation data from satellite images and a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we show that areas controlled by FARC prior to the declaration of a permanent ceasefire that ultimately led to a peace agreement experienced a differential increase in deforestation after the start of the ceasefire. The deforestation effect of peace is attenuated in municipalities with higher state capacity, and is exacerbated by land intensive economic activities. Our results highlight the importance of complementing peacemaking milestones with state building efforts to avoid environmental damage.
